Progress Software’s Loren Jarrett says firms have normalised chasing paperwork, even as it quietly costs them $84,000 a year.
Progress Software’s Loren Jarrett says firms have normalised chasing paperwork, even as it quietly costs them $84,000 a year.
If you run an accounting, legal or advisory firm, you already know the drill: chasing a client for a missing document, following up on a signature, clarifying a request that should have been clear the first time. New research suggests that drill is costing firms a lot more than most realise.
A survey from Progress Software, the company behind file-sharing platform ShareFile, found that professional services firms lose a median of roughly USD $60,000 (around AUD $84,000) a year to nonbillable client coordination work. The figure comes from Progress’s State of Client Engagement 2026 survey, which polled 355 firms across ten industries, including accounting, legal, financial services and healthcare.
According to the survey, firms are spending close to 20 hours a week collecting documents and signatures, chasing clients for updates, clarifying requests and tracking tasks that never make it onto an invoice. At an average billing rate of $65 an hour, that adds up fast, and it’s time that could otherwise be billable work.
It’s not just an internal cost either. Nearly 70% of firms surveyed said at least one in every ten of their quarterly engagements gets delayed because of missing information or workflow problems. That’s a client-facing consequence, not just a productivity one.
Here’s the part that stands out most in the findings: despite all this, most firms surveyed reported being fairly satisfied with how they manage client work. That’s worth sitting with for a moment. It suggests a lot of firms have simply normalised the chaos, treating chasing documents and clarifying requests as just part of the job, rather than a cost worth fixing.
“Helping clients and providing positive client experiences is the primary goal of professional services firms. However, many firms are failing to deliver client engagement experiences that are streamlined, effective and efficient,” said Loren Jarrett, EVP and GM, Digital Experience at Progress Software. “For years, firms have accepted fragmented client coordination as simply part of the job. Our research shows these inefficient, manual processes are not only costly but also detrimental to the overall client experience.”
That gap between “we’re satisfied” and “this is costing us $84,000 a year” is arguably the most useful insight in the whole survey for a small or mid-sized firm trying to work out where its margin is actually leaking.
You don’t need 355 firms’ worth of data to recognise the pattern. If your team is emailing clients for documents, tracking requests across scattered inboxes and spreadsheets, or following up manually on signatures, you’re carrying some version of this cost too, and at a smaller firm, that time often falls on people whose hours are meant to be billable.
A few practical questions worth asking your own team:
How much time does a typical week actually go toward chasing information rather than doing the work itself? Most firms don’t track this separately from billable hours, so it tends to hide in plain sight.
Where do client requests currently live? If the answer is “email, plus a shared drive, plus whatever the client sends through,” that fragmentation is exactly what the survey points to as the core issue.
Are engagement delays tracked back to a cause? If roughly one in ten engagements is slipping due to coordination problems industry-wide, it’s worth checking whether that’s happening in your own pipeline, and why.
None of this requires a major software overhaul to start improving. Centralising where client requests, documents and follow-ups live, even in a simpler, more structured way than email threads and shared drives, is the direction the research points toward. Progress positions its own ShareFile platform as one option built around that idea, but the underlying principle, treating coordination as a proper part of service delivery rather than the unpaid work around it, applies regardless of which tool a firm ends up using.
